Question

I am making a simple friends feature for my site and when people get a friend request I want it to show on there friends panel link so I tried this.

 $q = $dbc -> prepare("SELECT id_to read FROM friend_requests WHERE id = ? && read == '0'");
 $q -> execute(array($details['id']));
 $request_count = $q -> rowCount();
 if ($request_count > 0) {
echo '<li><a href="/friends"><img src="/gameimages/friends.png" height="16" width="16" alt="" /><strong>Friends (' . $request_count . ')</strong></a></li>';
 }
 else {
echo $request_count;
echo '<li><a href="/friends"><img src="/gameimages/friends.png" height="16" width="16" alt="" />Friends </a></li>';
 }

Now on the friends page where requests are shown all requests get the column of read set to 1, and by default it is 0. If there are rows with 0 it shall be a new request and the query above should fire letting users know that they have new requests, what am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Read is a reserved word in MySQL and need to be escaped with backticks:

SELECT id_to, `read` FROM friend_requests WHERE id = ? AND `read` = '0';